In health care, given the importance of patient safety, maintaining an adequate staffing schedule is highly important to insure that the relative needs of the patients are satisfied. In order to adequately staff typical health-care locations, such as specialized clinics, several factors are typically considered. For instance, for a particular day, clinics typically determine the relative needs of each of the scheduled patients and schedule enough employees to handle these needs. The decision making is fairly individualized, such that for each patient, at least one employee is assigned the task of taking care of that patient's needs. These needs may be determined based on previous visits by a patient, especially in a clinic that provides regular, continual treatments to its patients, such as a dialysis clinic.
Additionally, clinics typically account for possible emergency situations and/or patients requiring additional treatment, i.e., treatment that was not scheduled. Since these events are not foreseeable but may occur, the clinics typically schedule some additional employees to handle these situations. When determining the number of employees to schedule, clinics therefore typically schedule employees based on a worst-case scenario to make sure that plenty of qualified employees work each day.
Unfortunately however, these worst-case scenarios do not happen regularly, such that many clinics are generally over-staffed, which reduces the efficiency of the clinic. Moreover, many clinics lose efficiency by scheduling employees based on peak patient requirements wherein the peaks last a relatively short period of time, such that the clinic is over-staffed during other, non-peak time periods. Additionally, clinics often schedule many patient activities to occur at approximately the same time of the day such that many if not all the employees are busy during that time but are then idle for the remaining time, or until the next intermittent peak of activities occurs. Consequently, due to the lack of worst-case scenarios and unfortunate timing of patient activities, typical clinics are overstaffed and not as efficient as they might be.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.